Don Marti was Editor of LinuxJournal during its long and important middle phase. He's now back at LinuxWorld.com as Senior Editor.

MP3 (24:02)

Don & Gary Edwards and I spoke together a few weeks ago about the GPL-ing of Java and the conversation turned to our file format work on ODF at the OpenDocument Foundation. This led to the LinuxWorld Podcast, which Don recorded late last night after my return from Boston.

Hiser...

"We have to stop being coy...if we're serious about the success of Linux in the market-place -- either desktop or server -- we have to be realistic about aggressively attacking some of the choke-points these gorillas are exerting..."

Don's questions were excellent -- they're questions we've been hoping to field from the Linux sector for years now. I ramble through the points (am fixing that), but the conversation represents our views clearly,and hopefully for a wider than usual audience.

Forget about Vista and Office 2007 for a minute. Microsoft's SharePoint is the start of a terrible multi-decade commitment to a Microsoft architecture in which non-Microsoft components will never be viable. Among many implications, this means a business processing chain that includes SharePoint will have zero-tolerance for ODF. Your people and workflows would simply halt.

But I already feel safe in saying that, while many companies will hold
off on upgrading to Vista or the classic suite portion of Office 2007,
companies serious about building a web and services infrastructure
using Microsoft technology will find SharePoint Server 2007 to be an
upgrade that they won't want to hold off on.

Let me spell this out. If you have plans for SOA based around open standards, or you feel ODF is important to the future of your organization, then MS SharePoint will suffocate any hopes you may have had. Therefore, do not add even a demo of SharePoint.

Also a concern is Exchange itself. If you wish to use ODF, then the e-mail, content & document "Hubs" are critical. Exchange will suffocate your ODF plans, too. Therefore, MS Exchange replacement must be Phase II of your ODF implementation.

Zimbra for e-mail and Alfresco for your content/document hub will be the Exchange takeout solutions, but they will not yet give perfect document fidelity with ODF until the Foundation's ODF Plugin and its ODF Universal Conversion Engine are integrated on the client and server sides.

Most of the Office 2.0 candidates are using the OpenOffice ODF filters to get format conversion from legacy MS to ODF. They are finding these filters to be adequate for 90% of one-way conversions, just like OpenOffice itself. But the dirty trade secret is that that rate is not good enough -- as Massachusetts' ITD & Belgium's FEDICT have indicated through their demands and support for the ODF Plugin for MS Office. ODF file fidelity to MS legacy must be 100% to solve for round-tripping and for the Five Trouble Spots. Office 2.0 candidates will need the Plugin and the UCE to participate meaningfully in the market.

Here's the action plan if you want ODF or SOA: call John Newton (Alfresco) and Satish Dharmaraj (Zimbra) and kindly demand the integration of the Foundation's Plugin & UCE.